Text

part two: the problem of meaning

If we think about this for a moment, we realize that in this older form of language and writing, it was taken to represent a quality that human beings could not entirely comprehend. Hieroglyphic writings contained an otherworldly voice. Yet even here, because these worldviews held that the gods regularly consorted with human beings, and indeed, sometimes transformed themselves into humans, though with the caveat that they always retained their extramundane abilities, writing from this period of human consciousness was itself seen as not wholly human. This makes sense insofar as the sheer presence of writing, with its revolutionary qualities concerning human memory, must at first have seemed like a gift from the beyond. An oral culture has no means of verification outside of either the moment of experience itself, or, and especially so, without mortal memory. Even in our own time, we remain concerned about the passing of those who were present in a crisis, such as the Holocaust. The denial of history is at once the incipient suasion necessary to rewrite it, as well as being tantamount to annulling the very existence of those upon whom history descended like the apocalypse.

Writing overcomes much of this pushback, and in so doing, reveals the human imagination to be at the least, of a dual character. Inasmuch as one can deny something, one can also affirm it. Denial is not a default setting for the human conscience. It is quite otherwise, in general, if one has any integrity at all. And thus, writing promotes a kind of vanguard ethics. In this, it betrays its link with mythos, wherein the gods were generally seen to have a superior sensibility about them, even if they did not always act upon it. And if the book is ‘more than sacred’, as the song declares, it is precisely due to writing being able to defend the truth of things while at the same time acknowledging that things and truths may be distinct, and that perspective is a vital source of meaningfulness. After all, every piece of writing was done by a writer, a child of the creator/author, and thus we are once again thrust back into the ring wherein intent and authority combine to make matters less clear. And this is so not because mythos does itself survive the advent of logos; just as oral narrative is today, at best, the hobby of nostalgic virtuosos whose theater is more spontaneous and improvisatory than that of most writers. No, what preserves the nebulous nature of meaning in writing is rather the presence of language use in the face of Language itself.

What is meant by this next distinction? Saussure distinguishes between synchronic relations and those diachronic. If we think of a sentence as being splayed out along an x-axis, it’s very anatomy exposed in as literal a sense as one can muster, nevertheless, our very understanding of the sentential sense is bulwarked by all of the meanings that we cast adrift in making the decision to interpret the sentence in this way and no other. Each word in a sentence also has a y-axis which intersects it. The proverbial ‘he married his daughter’ is, with a few historical exceptions, only sensible if the male agent is a priest or minister of some kind. This example is not meant to be taken as a riddle per se, but one can immediately see that within every sentence, the native speaker of the language at hand is confronted with a puzzle which involves intent, meaning, authority, and context. That we are able, almost automatically, to walk through this otherwise daunting thicket of potential meanings, is testament to not only our linguistic literacy, but also that cultural. Schutz remarks, as a non-native English speaker, that if one does not know both the Bible and Shakespeare, one is often lost. There are just that many allusions, or yet outright quotations, from both sources, that we who speak English as our native tongue, mostly do not even recognize them! And to be fair, and less leading, one would generally phrase the nuptial scene more akin to ‘he performed the marriage ceremony for his daughter’ or such-like. If one was moving in the opposite direction, one might conjure truer riddles which test the literacy of the native speaker involved, but these kinds of efforts tend to be those of showboats and culture snobs, and thus do not fall within the normative parameters of Saussurean relations.

This said, the synchronic axis is ever-threatening to displace meaning in a very Derridean manner. If we are honest about the sentential, we must admit to ourselves that meaning, because it differs along the y-axis, is then deferred along the x-axis. The dialectical apex of this particular triangle, one of at least five in Saussure’s analysis, is of course the now proverbial différence. Interpreting text requires of us the suspension of this dynamic, which is precisely what, according to Derrida, cannot be done. Meaning is thus wholly given over to meaningfulness, which is itself somewhat delusory. This is not a nihilistic interpretation of the function of language-in-use, but simply an acknowledgement that how language itself works involves this constant ‘presence’ of a kind of non-presence. The ‘Langage as Pharmakon’ sensibility is a useful one, as it backdrops, as much as it sabotages, hermeneutics, and is itself an exemplar of the hermeneutic trial, in which it risks its own being just as do we, upon entering its open circle.

Text then is the outcome of a number of conflicting sources and forces. On the one hand, we have the transmutation of mythos into structural meaning, and on the other, the newer presence of the logos translated into context. For the case at hand, and for the time being, the latter is seen to trump the former. We can decide upon a meaning after all, and we do so by infusing its différence with the meaningfulness of contextualized consciousness. Even so, we remain aware that the next time round, meanings can shift, and what was the truth of this time and place and for these persons, is no longer and indeed none of it. This should not disturb us, and we now understand, with some half-century or so of reflection on the ‘post-structural’ critique, that difference may be overdone at the expense of both context and even homology. This is also the case in general, for we are, after all, a single and singular species which shares both consciousness and conscience. The differing along the y-axis, where each word has in itself multiple meanings and one must then choose the most likely one given all of the other words attached to the utterance or piece of writing, and the deferring along the x-axis precisely due to this ever-present instant of decision, do not obviate that all of this still takes place within a human language, and thus also is a part of human language in itself.

Yet we have touched upon one of the core analytic reasons why meaning can be so disputed, and this far beyond any specific politics or desires. The ‘conflict of interpretations’, to borrow from Ricoeur, is part of the essence of the medium itself, and from its very beginnings. It is not at all a coincidence that the first writings known are of two genres; epic narrative and warehouse records. These were, at the time, the most literal expressions of meaning that could be imagined. Since everyone knew the myths through orality – their ‘versions’ were understood as aspects of poetic license rather than egotistic licentiousness – to write them down was not so much to codify them but rather to simply affirm them. Records of early commodities stored for either purposes of trade or seasonal consumption, tributes or sacrifice, were as well something that could be verified; and this time, quite empirically. Are there really twelve-hundred–and-four amphorae of wine in my cellar? Hey, servant, go do a quick head count for me! Did Utnapishtim really tell Gilgamesh to turn his back on agrarianism and all of its inequity and iniquity both? Well, everyone knows that this is the case. On the one side we have the tradition; this epic speaks of these things and not those other. And on the adventitial side we have the equally new sense that observation in real-time could be its own discourse, completely apart from that mythic, and thence often in conflict with it. In the earliest of writings then, we see the original point of departure between religion and science, belief and thought, and idealism and empiricism.